North Carolina Democrats are dead-set on winning one particular race this election cycle. Party leaders say the result will likely determine the future of Congress, and have poured over $473,000 into the contest. Organizers, grassroots volunteers and other Democratic candidates are traveling across the state asking voters to pay attention to the matchup. It’s as make or break as it gets.
But it’s not the US Senate race between former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley. Nor is it any of the handful of close US House contests across the state.
Instead, it’s a race further down the ballot, one that many voters may not have heard about at all: the state Supreme Court contest between current Democratic Justice Anita Earls and former State Rep. Sarah Stevens, R-Surry.
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If Earls wins, it would be the second of a three-step plan for state Democrats to retake the majority Republican court before the next round of redistricting. The first was Democratic Justice Allison Riggs’ narrow reelection victory in 2024, and the third would be flipping at least two of three Republican justices’ seats in 2028.
On the other hand, if Stevens wins, it would expand the court’s conservative majority to 6-1. Democrats would then have to flip all three Republican seats in 2028 to regain the majority they lost in 2023.
At stake are the state’s electoral maps, and consequently, North Carolinians’ representation on the state and federal level. Every decade, lawmakers redraw state legislative and US House district maps to account for population changes identified by the US Census. In North Carolina, the resulting maps inevitably end up as subjects of court challenges — often more than once a decade. As the state’s highest court, the North Carolina Supreme Court is the final arbiter of how districts are drawn.
While the state Supreme Court tackles a variety of other issues, including voting rights, criminal law, utility rates and education, the redistricting implications are front and center this election cycle.
Meet the NC Supreme Court candidates
Before Earls became a judge, she had a long career as a civil rights attorney. Upon graduation from Yale Law School, she joined the first integrated law firm in North Carolina, founded by Charlotte civil rights lawyer Julius Chambers. Earls, who is Black, was attracted by the opportunity to work on civil rights cases.
Earls later spent five years in Washington, D.C., as deputy assistant attorney general for the US Department of Justice’s civil rights division under President Bill Clinton’s administration. In 2000, she argued on behalf of Florida voters who were disenfranchised in the presidential election, she said. But she missed her North Carolina work, and wanted to be closer to the communities she was serving, she told Carolina Public Press.
So in 2007, she founded the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for legal justice for Black, brown and low-income people in the South.
Earls was one of several SCSJ attorneys — including fellow Democratic Justice Allison Riggs — who represented voters in a 2015 racial gerrymandering case that made it to the US Supreme Court. In the case, North Carolina v. Covington, they argued that 28 state legislative districts in 2011 redistricted maps were unconstitutionally drawn based on race. They won in federal district court, and the Supreme Court upheld a requirement for lawmakers to redraw the maps.
Chris Ketchie, SCSJ research director, met Earls in early 2011 while doing some part time redistricting consulting. He said she valued good ideas over status, which made him feel like an equal in any room.
“She's the kind of person that you follow into battle at the drop of the hat, no questions asked,” Ketchie said.
As Earls gained experience, she realized that the state courts were important tools to protecting North Carolinians’ rights.
“At the time that I ran, there was no one on the court with civil rights experience or background, and yet it was a court that was deciding these issues,” she said. “So it seemed important to me to have someone on the court with that kind of experience and background.”
In late 2017, she stopped practicing law so she could spend a year campaigning for the 2018 election. While she would eventually hear many court cases covering topics she’s previously litigated on, Earls said that year gave her space to become independent.
“A lot of the cases that we've heard on the court all involve things that happened years after I had stopped practicing law, which is why I didn't need to recuse myself,” she said.
Earls cruised to victory in 2018 in a three-way race, 15 percentage points ahead of the second-place finisher.
If North Carolina’s electoral history is any indication, her reelection bid will be much closer.
The last time a state Supreme Court race was on the ballot was 2024, when Riggs won by 734 votes against Republican Jefferson Griffin, after half a year of post-election litigation. Four years prior, Republican Chief Justice Paul Newby defeated Democratic challenger Cheri Beasley by 401 votes. Other recent state Supreme Court race results have been separated by a percentage point or two.
This time around, Earls faces Sarah Stevens, a family law lawyer who served 17 and a half years in the state House before resigning to campaign In June. During her time in the General Assembly, Stevens became a leader on criminal law and election policy.
She sponsored some of the most high-profile legislation of the past few sessions, including Iryna’s Law and House Bill 958, this session’s wide-ranging elections bill.
Iryna’s Law followed the fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s transit system by DeCarlos Brown Jr., who had a documented criminal history and mental health issues.
The law tightens pre-trial bail requirements, makes changes to involuntary commitment laws, and calls for studies into mental health in the judicial system and alternative methods of execution beyond current law, in an attempt to resurrect the death penalty.
Stevens also pushed House Bill 805, which requires online operators to conduct age verification and get written consent of people pictured in pornographic images before posting them online. The bill also states that North Carolina only recognizes two biological sexes, bans state funds from paying for gender affirming care for people in prisons and requires local education boards to allow parents to remove their students from classroom discussions they believe impose a burden on their religious beliefs.
Continuing her trend of leading crime bills, Stevens sponsored Jaleeyah’s Law this year, which cracks down on criminal gang activity.
On the elections side, Stevens was one of many Republican sponsors of the voter ID constitutional amendment in 2018, and reviewed and drew several maps during her time in the legislature, she said.
Stevens said her redistricting experience taught her which questions to ask when maps come to the state Supreme Court. She also would bring a wealth of family law experience others on the court lack, she said. And if there was a question of legislative intent, she certainly would know where to find answers.
It took four months of convincing before Stevens agreed to run, though. Some of her friends, including current Supreme Court justices, told her she was “needed,” she said.
Carolina Public Press reached out to several of Stevens’ legislative colleagues and the North Carolina Republican Party for comment, but all did not respond or declined to comment.
In a June press release, however, the North Carolina Republican Party said Stevens will defend parental rights.
"Sarah Stevens has built a career as a common sense conservative who will uphold the constitutional rights of North Carolinians while radical liberal activist Anita Earls is in the pocket of rich out-of-state donors,” an unnamed spokesperson said.
Redo. Redo. Redo.
On Earls’ first day on the court, she joined a Democratic majority. Between 2019 and 2022, they made several key rulings that wouldn’t last.
One was Harper v. Hall, a case challenging partisan gerrymandering. The 2022 court ruled that drawing maps to give one party an advantage was unconstitutional and ordered the legislature to redraw maps based on new guidelines. The result was a US House map intended to elect seven Democrats and seven Republicans.
However, after Republicans won a 5-2 majority on the state’s high court in the 2022 election, they decided to take another look. The conservative bloc reversed the previous year’s decision, ruling that the legislature was in charge of drawing maps, and the court couldn’t decide partisan gerrymandering claims because it required them to put their thumb on the political scale.
Earls dissented, decrying the break from precedent.
“Unchecked partisan gerrymandering allows the controlling party of the General Assembly to draw legislative redistricting plans in a way that dilutes the voting power of voters in the disfavored party,” she wrote. “In so doing, those who hold political power can guarantee that they remain in office for decades, making them impervious to the popular will.”
The resulting 2023 map elected 11 Republicans and three Democrats to Congress.
The second reversed case was Holmes v. Moore. The Democratic-majority court originally ruled that a voter ID law was unconstitutional because it was enacted with the intent to racially discriminate, but the newly configured Republican-majority court decided instead that the courts should assume legislative good faith unless both discriminatory intent and impact could be proven. The voter ID law didn’t meet that standard, they ruled.
The final reversal related to a decades-long educational case, Hoke County Board of Education v. State of North Carolina, often referred to as the Leandro case. In 2022, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution requires state lawmakers to provide every child with the opportunity to receive a sound, basic education, and that the court could order $1.75 billion in state funds to be appropriated for that purpose if the executive and legislative branch repeatedly failed to correct issues.
Earlier this year, the Republican majority reversed that ruling on technical grounds, and said courts could not decide how the state spends money.
Earls again dissented, arguing that the legislature decides education policy, but the court can enforce a constitutional, educational right.
While courts can overturn precedent, she said, doing so in the same case is confusing and improper.
“A litigant shouldn't be told at one point in their case the law is X, and the same litigant in the same case later be told no, the law is Y,” she said.
Stevens has a different take. She sees Earls as an “activist judge” who rules based not on what the law says, but what she wishes it said. The reversed redistricting and voter ID cases are two examples of Earls acting as an activist, and the conservative court righting the ship, Stevens said.
“I've seen other opinions from conservative courts going, we don't like this law, but it's not up to us to change it,” Stevens said. “They'll basically send a message over to the legislature. She just simply cuts that out and says this is what it should be and what it will be.”
If elected, Stevens said she would be a true conservative who follows the law as written, not as she wants it to be.
Earls said she rules as the law requires.
“People can disagree about what the law requires, but the fact that they disagree doesn't mean that one person is right and the other is wrong,” she said. “It means we've disagreed about what the law says.”
Fundraising gap, statewide travel, undecided voters
On Tuesday, August 18, North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton was in Polk and Rutherford counties, talking to voters on behalf of Earls. Wednesday, she visited Burke and Cleveland counties. Gaston County was on the agenda for Thursday.
It may be a midterm election year where Democrats are predicted to perform well, but Clayton isn’t taking any chances.
“We know that 734 votes can come from anywhere, and that includes my rural counties in North Carolina,” she said.
Traversing the entire state is no simple feat. It’s not cheap, either. Earls has pulled far ahead in the fundraising game, according to State Board of Elections campaign finance data.
Stevens has raised $336,000, from 285 contributions. Earls, meanwhile, has raised $4.4 million, from nearly 16,000 contributions.
Nearly half of Earls’ war chest and a quarter of Stevens’ campaign funds are from their respective parties and political action committees. Stevens’ donations overwhelmingly come from North Carolina donors, while a quarter of Earls’ come from outside the state.
Money matters for messaging, Stevens said. Many voters haven’t learned much about the race or what the court does, so they take what candidates say at “face value,” she said.
“I don’t know that there’s any way we can ever catch up, but we'd like to get to a certain amount,” Stevens said. “If we have a third to a half of what she has, we can make a lot of progress.”
In the 2024 race, Riggs raised more than double the amount Griffin did, but it still came down to a few hundred votes. Money alone won’t win the race.
The vast fundraising gap doesn’t necessarily translate to recent polling, which generally show Earls up by 2 to 5 percentage points, with about 14% of respondents undecided.
Voter education is key to getting undecided voters to pick a candidate in the race, and connect the court’s role to pocketbook issues they care about, Clayton said.
“Gerrymandering is the reason why Republicans keep going to rallies and can spend 1,000 days not passing a state budget because they know their a**es are going back in those seats the next year,” she said.
Clayton said Earls and fellow Democrats are knocking on doors, engaging with faith leaders across the state, focusing on the eastern Black Belt region and showing up on college campuses.
Earls said she wants voters to realize that the court’s actions impact their daily lives. For example, she recently dissented in a Utilities Commission case where the majority allowed Duke Power to raise electricity rates for people in the western part of the state at a different level than the rest.
“When people are thinking about who to blame for the fact that their electric bill is higher now, they don't think about our court, and yet we are the last word,” she said.
Earls struggles to find audiences who aren’t already paying attention to politics, though. Stevens said it’s easy to share her message in person, but difficult to reach the 7 million or 8 million people who will vote.
For the next 75 days, they’ll both try to meet as many of them as they can.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.